I told them frankly that these jobs were pretty well filled up.
Listen! It is striking three. The motors are whirling down the asphalt street. The brilliant lights of the boulevard windows are fading out. Here, as in the silent woods of Canada, night comes at last. The restless city of pleasure settles to its short sleep.
THE RETROACTIVE EXISTENCE
OF MR. JUGGINS
The Retroactive Existence of Mr.
Juggins
I FIRST met Juggins,—really to notice him,—years and years ago as a boy out camping. Somebody was trying to nail up a board on a tree for a shelf and Juggins interfered to help him.
"Stop a minute," he said, "you need to saw the end of that board off before you put it up." Then Juggins looked round for a saw, and when he got it he had hardly made more than a stroke or two with it before he stopped. "This saw," he said, "needs to be filed up a bit." So he went and hunted up a file to sharpen the saw, but found that before he could use the file he needed to put a proper handle on it, and to make a handle he went to look for a sapling in the bush, but to cut the sapling he found that he needed to sharpen up the axe. To do this, of course, he had to fix the grindstone so as to make it run properly. This involved making wooden legs for the grindstone. To do this decently Juggins decided to make a carpenter's bench. This was quite impossible without a better set of tools. Juggins went to the village to get the tools required, and, of course, he never came back.
